


I love you like I love breathing

by iheartloofas, juvenna_reverie



Series: Week Three of Quarantine [5]
Category: Frankenstein - Mary Shelley, ジョジョの奇妙な冒険 | JoJo no Kimyou na Bouken | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
Genre: Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, we are married and we love each other a lot actually
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 04:48:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25178704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iheartloofas/pseuds/iheartloofas, https://archiveofourown.org/users/juvenna_reverie/pseuds/juvenna_reverie
Summary: this is way more tender than it has any right to be
Relationships: Kaaz | Cars/Victor Frankenstein
Series: Week Three of Quarantine [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824034





	I love you like I love breathing

Victor is clearly not a morning person. He has an image to maintain, after all, amongst the faculty and the students. He wakes up in darkness (Monster insists on blackout curtains, and still he sleeps so fitfully), but when he heads downstairs and finds a steaming hot thermos of coffee and a slice of yesterday’s raspberry cake on a napkin with a little doodle on it he finds himself… giddy? Surely not. 

He’ll go shower and catch a whiff of whatever smell Chanel has deigned to bottle and sell for too much, and he definitely, definitely doesn’t take another, deeper breath. When he finally leaves for work, he certainly doesn’t spray the collar of his greatcoat with his husband’s overpriced cologne, the gust of air from the closing door blowing the musk back into his face. 

Victor takes the tram to work, and he does not lean his face out the window to feel the breeze in his hair and remind himself, and if he did, in fact, do that it would only be for the first reason, not the latter. He’s taken the same tram to work for a while now, enough to know a few of the regular passengers. He would never be so sentimental as to think, secretly, that none of them really knew what it is to be loved so completely and absolutely that everyone and everything is colored in by that love. He wouldn’t be so deluded as to think that none of these people, not the old woman with the pink hat nor the man in the pinstripe suit nor the lady with the vinyl pumps nor all the rest of the passengers, knows what real love is.

Even when Victor sits in his office and the sun’s afternoon rays stream lazily in through the windows, he does not use the memory of the morning to get through long meetings with students that cheat on five-point quizzes or deans that think that his very important work with reanimation is “no longer worth the university’s time and money”. He especially doesn’t take the napkin from breakfast out of his pocket just to look at the little doodle and to read the little note (‘to my ray of sun shine') and feel his heart grow warm.

Inhale. On one particular morning, though, Victor can’t find it in himself to delight in fresh-baked blueberry muffins and a note with i's dotted with hearts. He breathes in and out, in and out.  
They would go on walks every Saturday morning, before the sun fully rose. Victor would carefully coax his husband’s hair into a braid so that it wouldn’t get in the way. He always looked debonair, as easy in his suit and tie as he was in his nakedness before bed. Monster would pick neighbor Dimitri’s prize roses and Victor would yell at him before begrudgingly accepting one to tuck into his lapel.

Exhale. Victor turns the Beretta in his hands, feeling how it clicks smoothly together, each hinge oiled, the barrel carefully cleaned every night in preparation for today. He supposes now that he hadn’t really expected to get the call, especially not now. It’s been so long. 

Sometimes Dimitri would see them and come charging with his old bayonet (he’d named it and everything) and Monster would take his hand and they’d sprint off into the bushes, laughing and gasping and feeling life flow through their veins. 

Inhale. Victor carefully clicks off the safety and sighs. The sound of the lever sliding back, of the hammer sliding into place, is loud in the sundrenched kitchen, in the place where he and his husband have made countless scones and muffins and breads and all manner of ephemeral floury things that disappeared with the day’s end. It is all so very loud. 

After fleeing from Dimitri, when they’d tangle their limbs in the burgundy sheets that Monster had insisted on, and Victor would comb his fingers through shining, slightly sweaty curls, and his husband would murmur about immortality and eternity and all that other poetic claptrap he loved so, Victor would smile. The sun rose behind the dark velvet curtains, but his own little world remained the same, undisturbed, unchanging. 

Exhale. He turns into their room. His room, Victor thinks, correcting himself. He’s never really lived here. It was always part of the job, he has a whole apartment that Vidia over at corporate had set up for him. His husband is there, sitting on the edge of the bed that Victor had made that morning. It seems so long ago, now. 

Inhale. Victor palms the pistol, shifting it from hand to hand. 

Exhale. He raises it, holding it in his trembling arm, the memories of long-ago training vibrating up and down his muscles. 

Inhale. The safety’s already off. All he has to do is pull the trigger. All he has to do is press his finger, the one where he wears his ring cause they never sized it properly, just press his finger to the trigger  
and let the bullet land where it was always going to land. 

Exhale. That’s all. Just pull the trigger.

Inhale.

Exhale.

Inhale.

“Take the shot,” says Kars.


End file.
